01. Summary
In her paper McMinn argues that western values such as the autonomous self, ease and comfort, cultural impatience, and rational thought “create barriers to Christian maturity.” She expounds upon each of these values and offers helpful correctives in hopes of provoking “discussion regarding pathways for encouraging spiritual maturity.”
- The Autonomous Self. McMinn says that “with autonomy came the assumption that individuals should be self-determining and free to apply reason to decisions . . . That came to be valued over claims of authority, especially religious authority, which increasingly lost legitimacy.” She notes that “moving away from a soul-that-belongs to an individual-belonging-to-self shifts the forming and shaping of our spiritual selves in significant ways.” To this she juxtaposes the view that we are relational “souls that belong” to God and to one another. To overcome the western value of insularity she stresses love of neighbor embodied in practices like inclusivity and acts of justice.
- Ease and Comfort. This is the tendency to think of suffering or discomfort as something to be done away with. While she acknowledges a healthy want to ease discomfort, she reminds us that “pain is inevitable. We have choices about how to respond to it, and our response can be spiritually formed or not.” She notes how “Protestants (in particular) have peeled away aspects of the Christian life that might be perceived as arduous or uncomfortable.” She reminds us that God is with us in suffering. As with the autonomous self, McMinn implies that this obsession with seeking comfort has left Christians insulated from developing habits that move us outward in unconditional love.
- Cultural Impatience. McMinn highlights how our culture values efficiency so much that we are willing to push the boundaries of even our earthly bodies. She warns against trends such as efficiency, progress, and growth, which have come to define church ‘success.’ She offers the virtue of patience as a corrective. “People with patience have come to trust in the slow work of God.” She challenges us to slow down and even waste time, to “pay attention,” and take in God all around us, especially in the natural order, which, like us, requires our care and attention.
- Rational Thought. McMinn writes that, “While Christianity uniquely claims that its believers enter a relationship with God, in the West we do so primarily through our minds. What we know and believe about God tends to be the presumed doorway into spiritual maturity rather than connecting with and experiencing God.” “Contemplative traditions” she notes, “suggest spiritual maturity emerges out of an experience with God, not primarily knowledge of God. Contemplatives embrace the unknowable more comfortably, holding questions without needing precise and certain answers, including what we think we know about God.” But she urges balance. Contemplation must coincide with an outward expression “of God’s outpouring love, exemplified by just, compassionate and merciful action.”
Overall, McMinn’s antidote for our cultural values of malformation are models of discipleship and formation that move us outside of the spiritual insularity of our “buffered selves.”
02. Key Quotes
“This essay explores how some Western, 21st Century cultural filters–or taken-for-granted assumptions–affect how we see our spiritual selves. Knowing how we are seeing a thing helps us better interpret what we are seeing, and how it influences choices we make.”
“With autonomy came the assumption that individuals should be self-determining and free to apply reason to decisions about how and where they lived, who they married, and what they believed as true . . . The autonomous self was the only valid entity to determine how one lived, who and what one became, and what one believed to be true.”
“We have opportunities to engage in justice and mercy in concentric circles expanding outside our communities. Doing so strengthens our shared sense of connection, of belonging, reminding us that God’s love is inclusive, that Jesus exemplified kindness and care to all he encountered, and that we are souls that belong.”
“We largely live with the assumption that discomfort and hard things can and should be mitigated. The American dream is, in part, a pursuit of ease.”
“Westerners are not known for patience or contentment. As previously mentioned, our economic system and values of progress and growth depend on discontent and impatience. People with content souls want and choose less because all that they need is already at the ground of their being. People with patience have come to trust in the slow work of God.”
“Western Christianity has tended to practice under the assumption that matter doesn’t matter, that there is a profound separation between the sacred and the profane or the spiritual and the material.”
“While Christianity uniquely claims that its believers enter a relationship with God, in the West we do so primarily through our minds. What we know and believe about God tends to be the presumed doorway into spiritual maturity rather than connecting with and experiencing God.”
“A contemplative orientation as a pathway to Christian maturity may have more salience in a culture that distrusts what they perceive as naïve certainty about unanswerable questions.”
03. Application Questions
- McMinn asks, “How does individual (and collective) pain form us? At what cost to our spiritual formation is the assumption that all pain should be eradicated?”
- McMinn wonders, “if a key question for our faith communities might be how we can encourage the kind of encounters that bring people face-to-face with God’s unconditional love and regard so that they are drawn into a transforming relationship that then becomes outward in its expression of that same loving regard?”
- How can emphases such as efficiency, progress, and growth undermine spiritual maturity?
- McMinn says, “The church held expectation for interested members to be trained in right behavior . . . and to show evidence of having learned Christ’s teachings before being allowed to be baptized and to participate in the eucharist. What kind of spiritual forming and transforming might that expectation have on faith communities in the Western world in the 21st century?”
- McMinn ponders, “what sort of spiritual maturity we might see if we began to offer opportunities to explore spiritual practices that encourage encountering God, such as wordless prayer (centering or contemplative prayer), Lectio Divina (which approaches scripture experientially), and attunement to God as manifest in the created world?”
- McMinn asks, “How might we examine our cultural blinders that keep us from seeing how our own lifestyles support industries and businesses that benefit a few while asking others to bear the cost?”